1. My name is Iqbal Mohammed and I am Director of Strategy at Publicis Modem Germany. I am based in Munich.
2. Additionally, I am a regular speaker at industry events on brand-building and social media around the world. I was a keynote speaker at the Siemens Global Web Conference in Munich (2008 & 2010) and at the Siemens Global Communications Council in Berlin (2009).
Before moving into my current role, I was an independent brand and social media consultant. Some of my consulting clients were Siemens AG, Telekom Austria and Virtual Identity AG.
3. I have over 15 years of experience in advertising and strategic consulting. Before moving to account planning at Ogilvy & Mather India, I was the Creative Head on the 360° team working on IBM and Lenovo - two of India's largest technology businesses.
4. My whitepaper, The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication : An approach to brand building incorporating long tail economics, is a winner of the WPP Atticus 2006 Award in the Branding and Identity category. The Atticus Awards are conferred by WPP - the world's largest marketing communications company - for best original published thinking. They are contested globally.
Among others, the above paper also earned a nod from Chris Anderson - editor-in-chief of WIRED magazine and the original proponent of the long tail theory. The paper is also available as a ChangeThis Manifesto (ChangeThis is "an online media source" that spreads ideas that change minds and improve lives.)
My current working paper, Predictive Pre-testing : An outline for an ad pre-testing model based on prediction markets, outlines a new and dramatically more effective way to conduct advertising pre-testing research - a field that hasn't seen any significant innovation for the last 50 years (according to the Advertising Research Foundation.)
5. I am a contributor to the Marketing and Strategy Innovation Blog - a blog that assembles "the world's sharpest minds in marketing and strategy innovation." Some of the other contributors to the blog are Alain Thys, Guy Kawasaki, Scott Goodson, danah boyd and David Armano. To read my contributions for the blog, just following this link.
6. I have a keen interest in online digital media and how the world of marketing and communication will be transformed by it. A significant proportion of my thinking (and the content of my blog) relates to the wide ranging effects of online digital media on the world of marketing and brands.
I am the co-author of two collaborative books on social media marketing. My chapter in Connect! Marketing in the Social Media era was entitled 'Can brands and consumers be friends? An instructive story from the ancient Indian epic, The Mahabharatha.' My chapter in Age of Conversation 3 was entitled, "The Fate of Grapes and Raisins: What to expect when you add social media to the communications mix."
7. My blog - MisEntropy - is where I publish my original thoughts on brands, social media and planning. The top posts I'd recommend for reading are : What blogging does to planners // Footnotes to: The tyranny of the big idea // Planning's very own Clover Machines // Why working on a Marketing Strategy is like solving a sudoku // The free-climbing guide to planning and problem-solving // How to forge a top-of-the-line cyborg planner // What fiction-writers can teach us about writing creative briefs // How advertising can help improve machine translation of languages // Information Osmosis and the case against Chief Culture Officer // Chief Not Listening Officer
8. I also conceived and implemented the MisEntropy Plannersphere Search Engine - a customised search engine that restricts its results only to all the account planning blogs in the world. This restricted search dramatically improves the chances of finding relevant results for those researching the plannersphere.
Some of other utilities I curate for the worldwide planning community are:
- Plannersphere Top 20 - A monthly tracking of the top 20 planning blogs in the world.
- Planners Who Twitter - A directory of planners from around the world who use the micro-blogging/broadcasting platform Twitter. The directory enables planners to network with the worldwide planning community.
- My latest blogging project - Planning Tools & Hacks - is a reference resource of offbeat planning tools and methods for planners around the world.
9. While at Ogilvy, I co-founded a drama troupe named The Ogilvy Theatre Company and directed its first performance - an adaptation of a Woody Allen play named God with a performing cast of over 20 people, all but of two whom were first-time actors.
Among other things, I have also ghost-written a sports column for a prominent Indian sportsperson.
10. I am a great believer in continuous and indiscriminate learning - I write a column titled 'ten things I didn't know until last week' on my blog (which is inspired by a BBC column.) A tandem project is The Ignoramus' Quiz, which I contribute on quiz groups and forums.
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